tickle the dragon's tail

动词 v.

英文释义

动词 v.
  1. To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong. idiomatic
    — Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail.
  2. To annoy an irritable person. idiomatic
    — Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail.
  3. To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.
    — The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.

词形变化

tickles the dragon's tail present,singular,third-person tickling the dragon's tail participle,present tickled the dragon's tail participle,past tickled the dragon's tail past

词源

From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was coined by American physicist Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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